The effect of the 'age-boom'

More of us are living longer than ever before, how will this affect our social care services?

Living longer

Trying to guess what the future will look like is never easy. According to the science fiction writers of the 1950s we should all be wearing silver clothes and have our own jet cars by now. So let’s start with what we know for sure, which is that right now the UK population has more older people in it than ever before and the numbers are growing.

Older people are the main users of social care services such as day centres, residential care and help at home. What kind of care will tomorrow’s older people want or need and will new technology make completely new forms of social care possible?

The age-boom

On average we are having fewer children, but we are living longer. So overall the number of young people is dwindling and the proportion of oldies in the population is going up.

Because the 17 million or so people who were born in the baby boom years of 1945 to 1965 are starting to hit retirement age, more than a third of the UK's population will be over 55 by 2025.

Fit or frail?

“I’m fitter than when I was working now that I’ve retired and have time to do exercise and eat healthily”, says Pam Bradley aged 68. But the question of whether or not our ageing population will mean more illness and health problems is currently foxing the experts.

It seems logical to expect that more older people will mean a bigger bill for the NHS and more demand for social care services. However as leading expert on health and ageing Sir John Grimley Evans puts it, "the encouraging thing that has been found in America is that healthier lifestyles have meant people are living longer but dying faster”. That could mean that people are relatively fit and well into their 70s and 80s, with most of their health problems in their last year or so of life.

The problem in trying to make these predictions is that a large part of how healthy we are depends on our own behaviour. What we eat, drink, whether we smoke and how much exercise we do, are going to make big differences to the need for future services.

Simply the best

The baby boomer generation have always had very different attitudes to those of their parents. They wore their hair long and spoke out for what they believed in and it seems likely that they will revolutionise what it means to be old in the UK.

Research shows that baby boomers tend to be pretty demanding consumers, with strong ideas about what the products they want should be like. They expect quality and choice in public services and don’t expect attitudes to change towards them as individuals just because they are older. They are likely to expect care services that are flexible, fair and able to fit in with their life, rather than the other way around.

John Fletcher’s approach is typical: “I’m used to organising my own time and being in control and after seeing the services that my parents have been offered I’ve got strong opinions about the type of care that I’ll want if I ever need it”.

This group of expert older consumers should also have an impact on the design of everyday objects and products. As Professor Roger Coleman, a leading expert on inclusive design says, “ instead of fixing problems to make things usable when people become older, we should design things to better standards in the first place”.

Smarter homes

Our homes are where our hearts are and that’s where most of us say we’d prefer to stay if we became ill or infirm. This seems unlikely to change in the future, even though half of all baby boomers are likely to be living alone by the age of 75. So the basic recipe for social care will have to include support services being delivered at home.

That all sounds pretty familiar so far, but technology could make all the difference. The Department of Health is already encouraging local authorities to use ‘telecare’ systems to help vulnerable people to live in their own homes rather than residential care. These systems can include many options from panic alarms to sensors that shut off the gas on the cooker if it is left on. In Japan a company has developed a ‘teddy bear’ that monitors peoples' response times to spoken questions. The bear records how long they spend performing various tasks, before relaying conclusions to a control centre where any unexpected changes in behaviour would be picked up. The aim of these systems should be to support independence rather than impose restrictions.

With virtual nurses, electronic memory aids and robots to help lift heavy objects (including ourselves) older people’s homes could look very different in 20 years time. Many baby boomers currently use computers and mobile phones, so they are likely to welcome the use of this technology to help them retain control of their lives. Gadgets and centrally controlled systems would also help to solve the problem of there being less people in the workforce available to provide hands-on care services.

It makes sense to start developing new care services now. We need to know what can work and most importantly how much it will cost. The future may see private day centres that specialise in gourmet food and exclusive care homes run by the residents, but for many the cost of a longer life is going to be a worry. Pensions are likely to be stretched and there will be increasing numbers of people falling back onto means-tested support from the state. So we’d better start shaping the future now, for everyone’s benefit

Created: 3/23/2006 Last updated: 4/7/2006